From MacEvangelist
”The Grinch Project” to bring PlayStation 2 emulation to Mac OS X Portableswith Hardware Add-on.
David Allouch, a French native is better known by his hacker alias “Jimbo”.Author of the network security product Netect, Allouch is now working onbringing blockbuster games to the Mac with a product that promises to playPlaystation 2 games and possibly even Xbox games in the future.
From MacEvangelist
”The Grinch Project” to bring PlayStation 2 emulation to Mac OS X Portableswith Hardware Add-on.
David Allouch, a French native is better known by his hacker alias “Jimbo”.Author of the network security product Netect, Allouch is now working onbringing blockbuster games to the Mac with a product that promises to playPlaystation 2 games and possibly even Xbox games in the future.
I caught up with Allouch who is currently in New York City.
Shane: Tell us how you got started with the Grinch?
David: A new startup that I was a part of created a PS2 debugger for MacOSX. It was during this consignment that we thought, “why not make a PS2emulator?” Things has gone very well, we are seeing leaps and bounds indevelopment and we are excited with the way things are going. We are nowtrying to work with Sony and Apple to release a fantastic product sometimein 2002. Our module based emulation can be use to emulate anything, and wehave generated a lot of interest.Shane: Other Playstation emulation software has encountered legal action,are you not afraid of this?
David: We don’t want to fight with anyone… we hope to have a collaborationfrom Sony… even if we don’t think there is any patent issue with oursoftware. We are not worried about possible suits because we are creatingthe emu in a fundamentally different way to what others have done, and weare doing everything without breaching any patents. We will very probably beusing additional hardware on the Mac, and we are looking at making this workwith PowerBooks as well as desktops. We can only do this with Mac OS X ofcourse, it is a really good OS for emulation.Shane: What price should we be looking at?
David: The less dedicated hardware we need to use, the cheaper it will be ofcourse. Currently we have no pricing details, but it will certainly becheaper than a Playstation. With this software I don’t know one gamer thatwouldn’t want to take his game with him on a trip… (can’t travel with PS2and 20-inch tv)Shane: And when will we be able to buy it?
David: We want to hit as soon as possible. I plan an alpha in 8 months… toget the market team ready to hit in 10 months…Shane: So tell us a little about how the emu works.
David: First the data is read from the dvd/cd/media/disc image then it isanalysed from what is call the “Risc emulator/Dispatcher” which is in chargeof deciding which module to pass the information to. There are two kind ofmodules, hardware and memory. Memory call are pure memory stuffs… loadingin memory data etc, hardware calls are commands to the joystick, network,graphic card… each on a module getting the commands… the big problem inan emulation is to know what call corresponds to what and to get theperformances on the modules. There is some tricks we did in the code thatcould only be done on OSX… that make the emu faster than it would ever beon PC… We are looking at Windows or X box emulation possibly. the mostimportant thing for us right now is to get the full support we need fromSony. So we will stay on this track for now…Shane: How many people do you have working on this?
David: we have 4 core programmers.
2 QA
2 Designers
Interface/installation/easy stuffs programmers.
Dan and Me, I debug fast, I read machine language, like I read English 🙂Shane: Thanks for your time David, one last question, how did you come upwith the name?
David: well… PS2 games are for chrysmass 🙂 so we stole chrysmass